Browsing by Subject "Improved cookstoves"
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Item Open Access A Hard Bargain? A cost-benefit analysis of an improved cookstove program in India(2016-08-01) Pinto, AlishaIn developing countries, access to modern energy for cooking and heating still remains a challenge to raising households out of poverty. About 2.5 billion people depend on solid fuels such as biomass, wood, charcoal and animal dung. The use of solid fuels has negative outcomes for health, the environment and economic development (Universal Energy Access, UNDP). In low income countries, 1.3 million deaths occur due to indoor smoke or air pollution from burning solid fuels in small, confined and unventilated kitchens or homes. In addition, pollutants such as black carbon, methane and ozone, emitted when burning inefficient fuels, are responsible for a fraction of the climate change and air pollution. There are international efforts to promote the use of clean cookstoves in developing countries but limited evidence on the economic benefits of such distribution programs. This study undertook a systematic economic evaluation of a program that distributed subsidized improved cookstoves to rural households in India. The evaluation examined the effect of different levels of subsidies on the net benefits to the household and to society. This paper answers the question, “Ex post, what are the economic benefits to various stakeholders of a program that distributed subsidized improved cookstoves?” In addressing this question, the evaluation used empirical data from India applied to a cost-benefit model to examine how subsidies affect the costs and the benefits of the biomass improved cookstove and the electric improved cookstove to different stakeholders.Item Open Access Benefits of improved cookstoves: Evidence from MTF surveys in Nepal(2021-05-01) Jin, ZhumaClean cooking energy has become the focus of many governments, researchers, and nonprofits, especially in low-income developing countries. However, 43% of the global population, approximately three billion people are still relying on traditional unclean biomass energy for their daily household cooking, and many of them are in developing countries.Item Open Access Energy & Development (Global Energy Access Network Case Studies)(2017-06-20) Aggarwal, A; Childress, S; Greene, L; Guidera, L; Guo, K; Holt, D; Klug, T; Litzow, E; Rains, E; Samaddar, S; Wakefield, TThe present volume represents the culmination of one of the Global Energy Access Network's central initiatives in our inaugural 2016-17 year. We observed that many of our student members had previously worked in areas of poor or missing energy access, even if the projects that brought them to those communities were not directly related to energy access. We sought to take advantage of students’ contextual knowledge from these experiences, and provide a forum for them to share their latent experiences widely with others. The six vignettes in this volume address a diverse set of topics related to energy access. They span five countries (India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, and Peru), primarily in rural areas, but sometimes address issues in urban areas as well. The entities featured in these stories include local and state governments, community-based organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Topically, they address a variety of technologies, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, as well as improved cookstoves. The issues discussed range from financial viability of utility providers, to relationships between local community members and distant institutions, to the gap that sometimes persists between householders’ beliefs and “expert knowledge.” Throughout, the authors highlight the richness of the setting and context even as they focus in on issues specific to energy access.Item Open Access Three Essays on Energy and Development Economics(2019) Usmani, FarazGlobal energy-use patterns are characterized by deep inequality. Electricity is indispensable for households, clinics, schools and firms, yet over a billion people live without it. At the same time, nearly three billion rely on traditional stoves and polluting biomass fuels (such as firewood) for their basic energy needs. The resulting household air pollution causes four million deaths annually, a health burden borne disproportionately by women. The international community has hastened to respond to this global energy challenge. This dissertation highlights how—and under what conditions—policies that seek to ensure universal access to modern energy deliver expected environmental and development benefits.
In the first chapter, I ask what drives heterogeneity in the impacts of large-scale rural electrification. Prior evidence on the labor-market impacts of grid electrification is mixed. I hypothesize that variation in local economic conditions—which can complement investments in infrastructure—may help explain why, and combine two natural experiments in India within a regression discontinuity design to test this hypothesis. Most of the world's guar, a crop that yields a potent thickening agent used during hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), is grown in northwestern India. The rapid rise of fracking in the United States induced a parallel commodity boom in Indian guar production, resulting in a large positive shock to rural economic activity. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India's massive rural electrification scheme, I show that access to electricity significantly increased non-agricultural employment in villages located in India's booming guar belt. Where these complementary economic conditions were lacking, electrification had almost no discernible impact. Using a firm-level panel dataset, I then provide suggestive evidence that this growth in non-farm work is partly driven by the rise of electricity-intensive firms that complement agricultural production. In line with the prior literature, I show that electrification alone may not be sufficient to deliver economic benefits, but I also demonstrate that, when combined with complementary economic conditions on the ground, access to electricity can enable individuals, households and firms to take advantage of new opportunities in potentially welfare-enhancing ways.
In the second chapter, I turn to household-level energy use and empirically evaluate the role played by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in delivering environmental, energy and development interventions in remote, rural settings. I develop a model of household decision-making to evaluate how NGOs address implementation-related challenges and influence intervention effectiveness. To test the model's predictions, I apply quasi-experimental methods to household-survey data from a randomized controlled trial designed to promote clean-cooking solutions in rural India. I uncover a large, positive and statistically significant "NGO effect": prior engagement with the implementing NGO increases the effectiveness of the intervention by at least thirty percent. These findings provide some of the first causal evidence on how NGOs directly influence outcomes, which has implications for the generalizability of experimental research conducted jointly with such local partners. In particular, attempts to scale up findings from such work may prove less successful than anticipated if the role of NGOs is insufficiently understood. Alternatively, policymakers looking to scale up could achieve greater success by fostering partnerships with trusted local institutions.
In the final chapter, I consider how heterogeneity in households' preferences influences demand for energy technologies. I conduct technology-promotion campaigns followed by second-price, sealed-bid ("Vickrey") auctions for two cleaner cooking technologies with over 1,000 households across seventy communities in rural Senegal. I induce exogenous variation in the extent to which these promotion activities cater to heterogeneous preferences by randomly assigning a subset of communities to an auction arm in which both devices are promoted jointly. Consistent with a model in which preferences are constructed—and not simply revealed—as agents make repeated choices, joint promotion lowers willingness to pay for the relatively less familiar alternative compared to settings in which the two devices are promoted exclusively. Rather than simply providing additional choices, implementers looking to enhance uptake of improved technologies must instead devise approaches to help potential end-users think carefully through trade-offs, crystallize and understand their own preferences, and identify solutions that fit their needs.